Ford Transit T250EXT conversion. 30 months and $50K later...

[polonus]

We bought new cargo van, the biggest Ford Transit available and for 30 months we converting it to a campervan. We did it ourself: Me, my wife and her brother. Neither one of us had any previous experience in this field. I am retired trucker, my wife is a nurse and her brother works in sales. And on this video you can see our 30 months of struggling with this project in 30 minutes:

 

[ExpressVan]

Very impressive and inspiring! I also enjoyed watching another video you posted on YouTube.

Thank you for sharing!

 

[polonus]

Very impressive and inspiring! I also enjoyed watching another video you posted on YouTube.

Thank you for sharing!

Thank you!

 

[RizeMaster]

You make it look so easy in 30 min. I bet it was a lot of work, not just the camper, but even putting together the video. Great job!

Nice to be able to get exactly what you want. Plus now you are an expert (hard to believe you had no prior experience).

 

[polonus]

You are right, it wasn't easy and sometimes there was a lot of friction between me and my wife, but everything turn out to be good.
Because we did everything ourselves, if anything goes wrong I'll know exactly where to look and how to fix it.
For instance I know now that building the floor from the panels was a bad idea. It was better to make it from solid sheet of linoleum or simmilar material. Also the chargers - I installed six of them and I overwhelmed the van's charging system. Four is the safe limit, so I had to disconnect two. Other than that everything seams to be fine. I already traveled to Deadhorse, AK and to Key West, FL and in few days we start new trip in our finally finished van.

For those who have no time here is a 5 minutes video:

 

[ks@yvr]

Very nice work. Congratulations

We too built out our camper ourself during covid and 2 years later everything has worked out great. We still have a couple of minor finishing things to do. A quilted headboard is an addition we would like to add and our garage slide needs the edge banding replaced since it has become chipped from dragging to many things over the edge but we are still 100% happy with the build and after using it for 2 years there is truly not a thing we wish to change from the original layout plan if we were to do it over again. The only bit of wisdom I can give is it will take many more hours than you think initially to build but the end result is worth it. We had to wait for some pieces due to supply issues during covid so there was some build on further then remove to put in missing equipment and reinstall a second time. The re&re was life but I wouldn’t want to be doing this if I was manufacturing vans as it was a unnecessary waste of time. I can live with it on our van but sure wouldn’t recommend if you were building vans commercially.